Self-driving cars are taking to the road and autonomous aircrafts are rapidly filling the skies for recreational, commercial and military purposes. The aircraft used are autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), meaning their onboard control systems are capable of making real time decisions independently without relying on human assistance. Usually a nominal flight altitude of 50 m is sufficient to avoid collision with most static obstacles. However, there could be buildings, trees, wires, telephone poles, and terrain features that cannot be predetermined through current out-of-date maps and data provided through a route planner. This fact, compounded with the rapid increase in near (100 m) air traffic density, calls for onboard collision avoidance capabilities that enable UAVs to move around obstacles and other dynamics objects.
Current systems such as LIDAR and RADAR are used by military and large commercial or research aircraft. However, these are often too expensive for smaller UAVs and therefore there is a large and growing need for low-cost, light-weight solution.